A conventional automotive navigation system sets one specific spot as a destination and computes a route. For methods for setting a specific spot as a destination, there are searches such as a search for the names of facilities, a search for addresses, a search for telephone numbers, and a search for categories of facilities.
However, setting one specific spot as a destination involves a lot of operational steps and also requires operating time. By this, operations take time, thus making it difficult to allow a vehicle to start to run immediately.
To address this issue, for example, there is the configuration as disclosed in Patent Literature 1 which is capable of setting a destination to a predetermined area (region), not to one specific spot, to search for a route, and causing the map of a destination's neighborhood to be displayed on a screen of an automotive navigation system. In Patent Literature 1, the address of a spot being at the center of a display region and a display scale are recognized, an administrative region serving as the destination's neighborhood is recognized based on contrast data, and the route to be followed that has the shortest distance from the current location to an intersection point between a road and an administrative boundary is searched for. When a vehicle has reached near the administrative boundary, guidance is provided to prompt a user to input for a setting as to whether to search for rerouting. A destination neighborhood at the user's destination can be set in the range depending on the degree of user's vagueness about the destination, and, thus, the route to the vague destination can be easily searched for.
In addition, for example, there is a configuration as disclosed in Patent Literature 2 which is capable of building in advance the area data that contains the location coordinates of spots such as primary intersections and the fronts of train stations in each area such as Hakone or Gotemba, and, for the setting of the area name “Hakone” for a destination upon a route search, extracting the location coordinates of spots contained in the target area from the area data to set the extracted location coordinates as the location coordinates of destinations, and, thereafter, searching for routes from the vehicle's current location indicating a starting spot to a plurality of other spots. The configuration carries out an operation of searching for a route using as a destination the closest spot to the starting spot, and allows a display monitor to display the operation result for route guidance.